http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
ONE OF the oddest things about this election season is how the press has
ceded the "international" issue to the Clinton/Gore team.

When George Bush handed the presidency to the Clinton administration, what
did he get? A world so pacified that for the first year or more of his
administration, Clinton didn't even have to pay attention to world affairs.
Saddam was bottled up. Russia was on its knees. Yugoslavia was restive, but
so far, not disturbing the peace of the world.

The PLO's leadership was in Morocco, urging on rock-throwing attacks by
unarmed young people in front of a sympathetic media. Israel's northern
villages were protected by a buffer zone in south Lebanon which excluded
terrorists. The question for Israel was how to secure its existing frontiers
against PLO infiltration.

China was weak and shamed by its Tianamen Square slaughter in front of the
world's media. The military operation against Iraq showed the world that
American firepower could subdue a regional power with relatively little
sacrifice on our part.

Now, look around us. Saddam, nearly fully re-armed, is threatening his
neighbors again, and knows exactly the measure of his enemy's resolve and
firepower, both of which are substantially less than it was in 1991.
Moreover, he is armed with the result of 10 years of secret research and
manufacture of deadly weapons which he carried on virtually without
oversight, despite our right, duty, and ability to carry it out.

Russia has been invited back into the heart of Europe, and its leaders have
been accommodated and nursed with U.S. money. China has been allowed to
rattle its sabers at a neighboring nation's democratic exercise of power-with
absolute impunity. Yugoslavia was first allowed to tear itself apart while
the west watched, under the eyes of Clinton's first secretary of State,
Warren Christopher; then its worst butchers were allowed to stay in power by
Clinton's second proconsul, Richard Holbrooke. Finally, under the hamfisted
Madeleine Albright, the west intervened at an inopportune moment, an
intervention which had three results: First it caused the temporary
expulsion of nearly a million ethnic Albanians, then it caused the permanent
ethnic cleansing of a quarter of a million ethnic Serbs, and finally, it
demonstrated the absolute impotence of U.S. airpower against a small military
establishment which was left virtually unharmed by weeks of "precision
bombing."

And Israel? Thanks to the relentless "even-handed" diplomacy of Clinton and
his proconsul Martin Indyk, Israel is no longer worrying about terrorist
infiltration and rock-throwing demonstrators. Now the demonstrators are
armed, and the problem with its frontiers is not to maintain their security,
but their very existence. The question now is whether Israel will be allowed
to keep some of Jerusalem, or even its pre-1967 borders, or whether it will
be rolled back to the UN partition plan of the 1940s, with a Palestinian
right of return which will finally destroy the Jewish state. All this has
not been the result of conflict, but of Clinton's "peacemaking" and his
unashamed meddling in Israel's elections.

Thanks to Clinton/Gore, by the time children now in school come to adulthood,
the world will be far closer to its complexion before Reagan. Our current
allies in Asia and the Middle East will be challenged by much more powerful
and wealthy adversaries; our regional enemies in areas like the Middle East
will be armed and supported by them, and well able to make serious mischief;
and the Jews of Israel may be wondering which of the countries with Holocaust
Museums might be induced to give them refuge.

Eight years of Al Gore's "experience" in world affairs has served to make the
world a much more dangerous place. Is there a single potential enemy to U.S.
interests that is not many times stronger and more confident now than there
was before 1992? Has there ever been a time since 1973 when Israel's
security and very existence was more threatened? And this is the
administration which will be getting the vote of the vast majority of
American's
Jews.

JWR contributor Sam Schulman is deputy editor of Taki's Top Drawer, appearing in New York
Press, and was formerly publisher of Wigwag and a professor of English at
Boston University. You may contact him by clicking here.